1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to a wearable device. More specifically, the device disclosed herein relates to a device that may be worn by a user to count a number of words heard by or spoken to the user over a period of time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Child rearing and development is often one of the most daunting tasks that new parents face. However, many parents simply lack the knowledge and tools to objectively track a child's development in the child's early years when brain development is most rapid. Moreover, recent studies have shown a correlation between brain development in young children and the degree of interaction they have with parents and others. Specifically, a high degree of correlation exists between the quantity of words spoken to a baby and brain development in children younger than three years old. Given that the number of words spoken to a baby predicts a baby's intelligence and that a person's intelligence stabilizes for life by pre-school, the number of words spoken to a child between birth and age three largely sets the child's mental ability trajectory for the child's lifetime.
In order to track the number of words spoken to children for these studies, researchers used cassette tapes or digital speech recorders to record conversations in the homes of young children. Once the recordings were completed, researchers tediously transcribed the recordings and manually counted each word heard by or spoken to a young child. This method of counting words spoken to a child is profoundly inefficient in terms of effort and time effectiveness. While these technologies made it possible to manually count the words spoken to a child they are inadequate to do any more than make a recording of conversations for later transcription. Other more rudimentary methods for counting the number of words heard by or spoken to a child have also included an observer manually counting words as the words are spoken to a child.
One difficulty in monitoring the number of words spoken to a child is that between birth and three years of age, most children become ambulatory and move away from, and out of recording range of, conventional stationary recording devices. However, with the advent of wearable devices, also known as “wearables,” mobile processing power has been substantially increased allowing previously stationary devices to become portable. As processing power per unit of physical space has increased, wearables have gained in popularity with the general public by incorporating processing power into articles of clothing or devices that attach to the head, hands, feet, arms, legs, or other body parts of their users. Several examples of wearable devices include a calculator wristwatch, eye glasses that incorporate heads-up displays, ear muffs or hats that incorporate head phones or ear buds, smart watches, smart headbands, smart pedometers, and a host of other implementations that provide various users with desired information or entertainment. Many wearable devices have been implemented as health care or health monitoring devices and are used to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, physical activity levels, body temperature, and other physical indications for the ill and for high performance athletes.
It is therefore one object of this disclosure to provide a wearable device that counts the number of words spoken to or heard by a user in real-time. Another object of this disclosure is to provide a wearable word counting device to count the number of words spoken to or heard by a user and transmit a real-time word count to another device. Another object of this disclosure is to provide a wearable device that streams information to a remote device with greater processing power. Another object of this disclosure is to provide a wearable device capable of performing speech analysis in a low-power environment.